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Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Changes for Jaiku and Farewell to Dodgeball and Mashup Editor

By Vic Gundotra, Vice President, Engineering

Google has long believed that thoughtful iteration is the best way to build useful products for our users. As part of that process, we are always looking for ways to better focus our teams on the products that can have the most impact.

As we mentioned last April, we are in the process of porting Jaiku over to Google App Engine. After the migration is complete, we will release the new open source Jaiku Engine project on Google Code under the Apache License. While Google will no longer actively develop the Jaiku codebase, the service itself will live on thanks to a dedicated and passionate volunteer team of Googlers.

With the open source Jaiku Engine project, organizations, groups and individuals will be able to roll-their-own microblogging services and deploy them on Google App Engine. The new Jaiku Engine will include support for OAuth, and we're excited about developers using this proven code as a starting point in creating a freely available and federated, open source microblogging platform.

Some of you may also be familiar with Dodgeball.com, a mobile social networking service that lets you share your location with friends via text message. We have decided to discontinue Dodgeball.com in the next couple of months, after which this service will no longer be available. We will communicate the exact time-frame shortly.

Finally, in the spirit of onward and upward, we have decided to shut down the Mashup Editor, currently in limited private beta, in favor of the more powerful App Engine infrastructure. Existing Mashup Editor applications will stop receiving traffic in six months, and we hope you will join our team in making the exciting transition to App Engine.

1. Beef up Google Office to be the truly generative and dynamic alternative to MS Office that it was supposed to be (not a lame parody like OO).

2. It will naturally rely heavily on a lot of complex code which the IE team could a hard time keeping up with.

3. With a truly awesome Office suite right there in the browser, the operating system start to get kind of irrelevent, doesn't it?

You could pull off a trifecta, forcing Microsoft to be on the defensive on three fronts at the same time. All you have to do is stop neglecting Google Docs. Kill these stupid distractions, all of them. Kill the quotes nonsense, the trends nonsense, and the audio indexing nonsense.

That's a shame. I found a new microblog site that looks promising. They claim to be twitter for freelancers and professionals. It's called blellow.com. They are allowing people to sign up to beta test it, but I don't think it's live yet.

We'll see how it compares to jaiku - they have groups similar to jaiku's channels.

So, since you're cleaning house, when will you get rid of all the FAILED Google Web Search Variations? You know, like Google Product Search, Google Book Search, Google Scholar, Google Finance, GOOG-411, Google Health, iGoogle, Google Notebook, Google Checkout, Google Patent Search, Google Product Search (originally called Froogle - lol!), and ALL THE REST? When will you admit that pretty much anything beyond BASIC WEB SEARCH has failed? Google Video's spectacular failure was masked by Google's subsequent purchase of YouTube. Unfortunately for Google, most of the rest of this stuff has already failed (and there's no really viable Plan B that can hide it). LOL!!!

@JimJust because you do not use one of Google's product doesn't mean they should shut it down, nor that no one uses it.iGoogle, checkout, book search and google finance are used by a LOT of people and in no way have failed.

Some nameless, faceless blogger said: "Just because you do not use one of Google's product [sic] doesn't mean they should shut it down, nor that no one uses it."

I reply: just because you and a tiny little handful of others might (might) use these FAILED OFFERINGS occasionally, doesn't mean that they haven't (in fact) FAILED. The facts: nearly everything Google has tried to do (on its own) beyond Basic Web Search has failed to take off. I understand why you can't see it... really, I do... LOL!!!

Please release Dodgeball as open source!! This project would make an incredible contribution to the open source community. I don't understand why you would open source Jaiku when there is already laconica but are set on throwing Dodgeball in the garbage. Dodgeball could have been awesome had it been a higher priority, so what better way to make it something then to give it to a community that will make it THEIR priority?

I'm really disappointed to see Dodgeball go. It is very popular here in Seattle, and by far the best location-based social networking tool out there. I would really love to see someone else pick up Dodgeball. I know that if they put their minds to it they can make it profitable.

And there goes all my belief in the Microblogging services. If the only service that actually had a chance of making it, with a decent interface, an awesome concept, and an excellent community, is being shut down, i don't expect a lot from other services. So long Jaiku, it was great while it lasted!

To the Matt Parrott: it is, I believe, currently unfeasible to attempt to build something like MS Office in a browser, especially with AJAX. Google's target with that is a demographic that needs quick access and not necessarily the spectacular or complicated: and it works.

Doing too much with Google's Office Online could badly increase bandwidth and make the service unfriendly to the huge number of people who do not have blazing fast bandwidth, which is quite a lot.

Good move to streamline Google. : ) Thanks for the services you do provide; I'm actually considering, at least in the near future, opening a Google Apps account myself!

Google will need to concentrate on services that earn money now we are in times of recession. App Engine will earn them money if businesses use it as a Cloud platform. On balance I would prefer improvements to the GAE Cloud platform and as such I am happy that resources are redirected - however I understand the frustrations of users investing time into a framework that is depreciated before reaching full potential.

I spent long time testing developing applications with Google Mashup editor. Its very sad to hear about the shutdown of this product. What will happen to the existing applications developed on it? Can we still access them?